According to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, only a small minority of Alberta parents are now agreeing to have their children vaccinated against COVID-19, while the vast majority are not.
This seemingly unlikely claim was only one of a number of troubling statements made by Smith at town hall meeting Tuesday organized by the Calgary-Lougheed United Conservative Party Constituency Association.
We only know about this because, while the “one-on-one with Premier Danielle Smith,” was ignored by professional media, it was attended and live-tweeted by Katie Teeling, the former editor of the University of Alberta student newspaper, The Gateway. She did a great favour for Albertans with her informative tweet thread.
The premier was aggressively questioned about parents’ consent for their children to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Constituency Association President Darrell Komick, who argued that parents were provided with insufficient information about mRNA vaccines, a bugbear of the anti-vaccine crowd.
“Right now, it looks like the government endorses the vaccines the way they’re positioned on the chart,” he complained according to Teeling’s transcript, a short portion of which she provided to AlbertaPolitics.ca.
“No, I don’t think so,” Smith responded. “Because I look at the immunization status and that shows me that people are getting the information that they need to make a choice, and people are very smart. People are smart.”
“No they’re not,” Komick countered, at which point the premier was heckled by members of the audience, shouting “No!”
“Six per cent are choosing to get the vaccination for their kids,” Smith said in response. “That means it’s 94 per cent that are not. That says to me that people are smart, and they’re figuring out whether or not it’s right for their kids.”
Now, however you look at it, this statement is extremely troubling.
It’s bad if the premier is just gas-lighting, making it up for a (mostly) sympathetic audience with the danger in mind that party members could vote for a leadership review at the UCP annual general meeting in Red Deer in November.
But it’s worse, obviously, if it’s true. The implication a significant portion of the population has been so persuaded by a MAGA-influenced government that it has moved beyond science into a YouTube rabbit hole of public health misinformation is genuinely frightening.
This isn’t the first time the Calgary-Lougheed UCP Constituency Association has gotten up to something like this. At least five UCP MLAs turned up for an “Injection of Truth” vaccine-misinformation town hall featuring a group of discredited anti-vaxx physicians in June.
Before that previous event Smith told her bi-monthly Your Province, Your Premier radio show that she supported Calgary-Lougheed MLA Eric Bouchard’s effort.
But showing up in person for what she had to know would amount to an anti-vaxx revival meeting seems even less appropriate.
The political calculation behind her appearance is interesting. Notwithstanding Take Back Alberta founder David Parker’s ongoing troubles with Elections Alberta, Premier Smith obviously feels insecure enough to need to keep things sweet for the people in the party’s base who former UCP premier and Calgary-Lougheed MLA Jason Kenney used to refer to as lunatics.
From Teeling’s tweets, we also learn that Smith also told listeners, as has been widely rumoured, that her government will update the provincial Bill of Rights in the fall to protect the right of vaccine refuseniks to spread disease in health care settings. (This is a topic that deserves its own discussion of the legal and public health chaos that could result from such a policy.)
She called it “a problem” that there are so many doctors on the board of the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons. There were hints she’d still like docs to be able to prescribe ivermectin, the notorious veterinary deworming paste, to treat other diseases.
She also had to put up with some heckling from party members who want the government to grab the Canada Pension Plan without giving Albertans a chance to vote on the matter. While she insisted there would be a vote, she baselessly suggested the CPP investment fund is being used “to win votes” in Eastern Canada.
To really get a sense of the tone of the meeting and the range of topics covered, though, readers need to go through Teeling’s illuminating tweets themselves.
Meanwhile, in other news, a new scientific study shows the United States could have been spared as many as a quarter million deaths from COVID had all states had adopted the stricter mask and vaccination requirements imposed by the country’s northeastern states between July 2020 and July 2022.
“If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10 per cent to 21 per cent lower than the 1.18 million that actually occurred during the two-year analysis period,” said the study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association Health Forum.
However, had the entire country imposed restrictions similar to those in the 10 least restrictive states – the ones whose approach Smith has said she thinks Alberta should have adopted – the study suggested the number of deaths would have been 13 per cent to 17 per cent higher.
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